You kids these days with your Halos and your Gear Wars and your Half Lifes... you don't appreciate what we had to work with! Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy-schmancy high-end graphics in our shooters! No complex storylines, neither. We didn't even have a jump! You know what we had? We had Doom.

Doom was a simple game. You were stuck on Mars. You had to get unstuck from Mars. And between stuck and unstuck was a buncha monsters that wanted to kill you. So you got a bunch of guns and killed the monsters. None of this ninety-minute cutscene junk. You get to the end of the level, you maybe get a bit of text saying what's next, and you move on.

No mouse controls, neither. [WASD] to move, [Q] and [E] to strafe, [R] to open doors and use switches, number keys to switch weapons, and the space bar to shoot.

What? What was that? Why bother with a game that's 15 years old? Because it popularized the whole first person shooter genre! And at its core, it's one of the greatest of all time: undiluted by extras, a pure shooter at its core. In here, you'll find the foundations for modern FPS games, what inspired Bungie, Epic, and Valve.

To play this online Flash version, you'll need Adobe Flash Player 10. Compiled into Actionscript from the original Doom source. Sorry, the game is not compatible with PowerPC Macs.

So pay some respect to your elders! Don't make me go find the BFG 9000.

Heh, back in the day, I would rather take down Carmen Sandiego and her international crime syndicate rather than blow the heads off of monsters on Mars for some reason. (The reason was that I was very young at the time)

Still, this game had the idea of shooting stuff that wasn't human, opening the way for game with guns to a wider audience, who would rather shoot zombies or robots than their fellow humankind (well, the living, in the case of zombies). I think I might just give this a whirl, then reminisce about the Oregon Trail and Sonic the Hedgehog's 2D glory days...

I was working in a notebook design lab at Compaq computer when this came out. The engineers would use Doom to test out the new Presario boards. Everyone in the lab was amazed by the graphic 3D detail and fluid control of the game. Doom not only popularized first person shooters, it was the game that made the PC a serious platform for video games, and made people realize that a real industry could be built on PC gaming.

Ahh, Doom! I can still hear the faint strain of MIDI music echoing in the dank recesses of my brain, the screams of Imps being ripped to shreds by my trusty chainsaw... What golden era that was: when Men were Men, Women were Women, and Cyberdemons were Cyberdemons!

I miss when first person shooters used to have levels in the style of doom(particularly doom 2 and final doom). there was an element of puzzle solving in the level design that seems like the only thing the fps genre didn't inherit from the doom franchise. i can't think of a fps in the last few years where i didn't feel like i was being led around on a rail, (a lot of times with a little narrator telling me exactly where to go and what to do) and where excessive backtracking didn't seem like a chore.

Hmm, now I'm starting to wonder, and maybe some of the more...ahem...geekier of you will know the answer. Which was the first FPS to distribute a level editor so the masses could create their own forums of destruction? Bwa-ha-ha.

Sorry, noobz, but the original first-person-shooter is Maze War, from 1973. It originally ran on the IMLAC minicomputers at NASA Ames, then spread to MIT and Xerox PARC. (I played it on Xerox Alto systems in 1984.)

Yep, I remember I specifically upgraded my computer to play Doom. Funny now how awkward the controls feel, when you're used to mousing around in all directions. Still, I'm gonna try to finish it again.

The grand old daddy of fps! I know there were others, I played Elite which to me was a 3d fps space shooter, way back in about 1985, but Doom was the first with real colours and immersion.

I remember playing it in the lab on a Sun Sparc station, and you could link your workstation to two other Sparc stations on either side and set the monitors to show you 90º left and 90º right views, giving you a total of 270º. (about 3000x900 pixels) Not bad for 1994 tech.

These Sparc workstations cost about $10 000 each and playing games was severely frowned upon. Especially using three of them for a single game. Even today in 2008, I still haven't yet experienced again playing a FPS spread across three large screens. Yes I've seen pics of large Quake installations, but I haven't played them.

Doom was the best. Shame the controls are slightly awkward in this flash implementation. I remember space used to open the doors, not 'r'.

And the less said about Doom 3, the better. I've started it about 3 times or so, but still get fed up with it about an hour or two in.

blakyoshi, I think it's a problem of your pc. This worked fine on the 3 machines I tried it on :/

Anyway. I really had to download chocolate doom, I'm glad somebody ported it to flash but the commands with wasd + r + q/e just don't feel fine for me.
As soon as I was able to play oldstyle (and yes...I was 4 y-o when I first played it) with traditional ctrl + spacebar + ., + arrows it all was really better. And it has sound.
You need IWADs but you can take them from your old original games (and add new ones).

So: thanks and credit to the guy for the work on flash porting, give him 5/5 on Kong, but then go buy a collector's edition and play those wad files on a different host than flash 10.

Good solution for pause problem follows:
Use the ~ key to pause. Make a file, then use the escape key to go to the main menu. Select load game, select your file, and play.
Sounds pretty complicated, but works better then just waiting for it to de-pause.

Work your way to the end of the level, then double back to the room filled with toxic waste. A door should have opened to your right with some pickups. Exit the chamber, then continue backtracking out of the room. Turn around, hold Shift to run, then dash back into the toxic room, through the secret door, and you should see an elevator. Get on quick before it closes, and you'll find another hidden tunnel with some armor bonuses.

I've yet to figure out how to get outside the building to that megaarmor, though.

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